Managing information relating to knowledge or expertise across a distributed entity is a difficult task. For example, given the growth of collaboration between technologists associated with a corporate entity distributed throughout the world, one of the more difficult tasks in managing a corporate research portfolio is keeping track of what is occurring in each location with regard to technological developments and encouraging the transfer of that knowledge throughout the corporation.
Thus, parties in such globally-distributed corporations struggle in their ability to knowledge share despite the fact that they are otherwise connected over a distributed information processing system, e.g., public Internet or private company network. Such a lack of knowledge sharing can have a significant adverse impact on the viability of the globally-distributed corporation.
Furthermore, another difficult task is determining which areas of knowledge to pursue within a corporate research portfolio. With existing approaches, humans analyze data or follow hunches and apply resources in certain areas, but learn later that a better opportunity should have been pursued in another research and development area.